The video below is going viral on the Internet and purportedly shows Andrea Mears, 23, getting interestingly irate over a man flying a drone on a public beach. The beach is reportedly Hammonasset Beach in Madison, Connecticut. She is heard calling the police and objecting to his filming people. She is shown holding the man’s equipment and then the scene turns violent. During the fight, she is quoted as saying “Yeah! That’s what you get you little pervert.” However, it turns out that it would be Mears who would be arrested.
As we have previously discussed, just as citizens have a right to film police in public, they have a right to film other citizens as long as it is not harassing or endangering those citizens.
The woman was eventually arrested according to the PINAC website. She was charged with assault in the third degree and breach of peace.
What is interesting is that the man (who goes by the web name of “Hogwit”) claims that the woman then accused him of assaulting her and that the police believed her until he was able to show his videotape. Mears is quoted as saying during the fight “Then maybe you shouldn’t be taking pictures of people on the beach! I’m gonna beat your a** you little m*****f*****!” However, Hogwit says that she then claimed it was he who assaulted her. This is from a forum linked by PINAC:
They first listened to her story of lies (she claimed I was taking close ups of people in bikinis, and that she had asked me to stop flying before calling the police, and that I was the one that assaulted her, and and and). The police approached me very aggressively, believing her full story, and before anything else was said I brought up something that she missed… The fact that the cell phone in my hand has a camera…that was recording. I had video evidence that she went nuts completely unprovoked, and was the one that assaulted me.
What is the medical term for opposite of bow-legged?
Not a medical term, but we always called it “knock-kneed”, because your knees would knock together when you walked. I rode horses a lot when I was young, and I was so bow-legged that I couldn’t put my knees together when I stood straight. That went away years later when I didn’t ride so much.
I think photographing people in public places is tricky. Candid shots of people on the street are interesting but people get annoyed when they get photographed on the street. Maybe the right approach is to ask first.
That would be a good and civil standard to keep. And respectful of our fellow citizens.
The problem is when our overlords set such a bad example, so as to do exactly what you say we shouldn’t do, film people 24/7 in public without asking, it kinda undoes the whole civility, respect for privacy in public, concept.
Unless of course you think it is just fine for the government to do it, but not private citizens.
I have watched this with an enterprising mind. There is a way that the quadcopter could be used to make a lot of money in entertainment. No, it has noting to do with sex.